Abstract: State estimation plays an essential role in modern SCADA Energy Management Systems (EMS), as many EMS applications like contingency analysis and optimal power flow rely on a correct state estimate. Hence, the security of the state estimator is crucial for the proper operation of the power system. In this talk we address the security of state estimation against false data injection attacks in single-area and in multi-area systems. For the single-area system we define security metrics to quantify the vulnerability of state estimation to attacks performed against components of the communication infrastructure used to deliver the measurement data from the substations to the control center. We discuss an efficient algorithm to calculate the metrics, and describe an algorithm that uses these metrics to incrementally decrease the vulnerability of the system to cyber-attacks. For the multi-area system we consider false data injection attacks on the convergence of distributed state estimation. We discuss the potential impact of these attacks and an algorithm to detect convergence problems. We show numerical results based on the IEEE 118 and the IEEE 300 bus benchmark power systems.

Biography: György Dán is an associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He received the M.Sc. degree in computer engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary in 1999, the M.Sc. degree in business administration from the Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary in 2003 and the Ph.D. in Telecommunications from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2006. He was a visiting researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in 2008 and currently he is a Fulbright visiting researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include the design and the performance modeling of networked systems based on queuing theory and game theory, and cyber-physical models of power system information security.